It’s a Grueling Journey From Tel Aviv to SFO

One Sunday evening every month, Nitzan Hirsch-Falk, a mergers and acquisition lawyer in Tel Aviv, reads his four daughters a bedtime story, kisses them goodnight, and takes a cab to the airport.

It’s the start of an 18-to-24 hour journey to Silicon Valley– involving a grueling transatlantic flight, an hours-long layover on the east coast, another flight to San Francisco, and an hour or so in a rental car.

“By the time you get to your meeting, you’re completely exhausted,” a bleary-eyed Hirsch-Falk said at his office, overlooking sprawling Tel Aviv, where building rooftops are sprouting tech lofts like mushrooms after rain.

Amid a wave of global interest in Tel Aviv’s start-up scene, the city’s tech foot soldiers—entrepreneurs, venture-capitalists, attorneys and bankers—are lobbying for a faster way to get to Silicon Valley. A Who’s-Who of Israeli tech heavyweights are circulating a petition to convince an airline–any airline–to start operating a direct flight between Tel Aviv and San Francisco.

The 14-hour flight would require a big jet. The organizers of the petition, including Waze CEO Noam Bardin, are using the petition to show there’s enough demand to fill all those seats. Mr. Bardin says that the thousands of signatories so far have indicated they’d be buying 4.5 roundtrip tickets a year, on average.

There’s long been a business case for exotic routes catering to a sudden uptick in business travelers–in recent years often enough, to far flung oil boom towns.

But so far, airlines don’t seem convinced. Anat Friedman, a spokeswoman for Israeli carrier El Al, says that while the airline is continuously examining different routes, it currently has no plans for a direct TLV-SFO flight.

Kevin Johnston, a spokesman for United said “we monitor demand in all the markets we serve and review potential new-route opportunities on an ongoing basis…butwe have no new-service announcements to make at present.”